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Embattled Berlusconi Picks Fight With Gays

By Robert Mackey November 2, 2010 4:39 pmNovember 2, 2010 4:39 pm

On Tuesday in Milan, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi tried to play the sex scandal that has cast his political future in doubt for laughs by joking at a motorcycle show that it is “better to be fond of beautiful girls than gay.”

Mr. Berlusconi’s remark, which was caught on video and posted online by the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera, prompted anger from Italian gays, who staged a demonstration outside the prime minister’s residence in Rome where they held up signs that said, among other things, “Better Gay Than a Pig.”In the same speech in Milan on Tuesday, the prime minister suggested that Italian newspapers had gone too far in their reports — illustrated with lengthy slide shows — on a 17-year-old Moroccan girl who regaled Italian police with tales of orgies at the prime minister’s villa when she was arrested on suspicion of theft earlier this year.

Although Mr. Berlusconi has acknowledged calling the police on behalf of the girl, who calls Ruby Rubacuori (Ruby Heartrobber) on Facebook, he has insisted that he never had sex with her and she backed off her original claim about the orgies in an interview with a newspaper owned by the prime minister’s brother over the weekend.

That hasn’t stopped the rest of Italian media from obsessing about the curious name the young woman — who turned 18 this week — initially said the prime minister used for the sex parties: “bunga bunga.” As the Rome daily La Repubblica reported, the girl told investigators that “Silvio” told her that the ritual of “bunga bunga” was a rite of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s harem.

That led an Italian comic to perform a song called “Bunga Bunga” about the scandal set to the tune of Shakira’s World Cup anthem “Waka Waka” last week.

Oddly, as La Repubblica explained, the words “bunga bunga” might have been introduced to the global lexicon by friends of the British writer Virginia Woolf in 1910. That year the writer was one of a group of pranksters who bluffed their way, in blackface, through a tour of the British warship H.M.S. Dreadnought posing as an official party of Abyssinian princes.

The connection to Colonel Qaddafi led an Italian opposition party, led by the anti-corruption campaigner Antonio Di Pietro, to put up posters around Rome showing the “evolution” of Mr. Berlusconi into a a version of the Libyan leader.

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